Towards collaborative multi-device computing

Mobile devices (e.g., smartphone, wearable device) are now an essential part of human life as the most effective and convenient communication tools, providing users with rich experience of various services. Besides traditional web-based services, the research community and industry are exploring computation intensive capabilities of mobile devices to seamlessly augment users' cognitive abilities. However, the resource and communication shortages of a single mobile device make it insufficient in providing high quality of experience (QoE), especially in satisfying the real-time and interactive constraints. Recently, considerable research has addressed these problems, and the proposed systems take advantage of collaborative mobile computing which benefits mobile devices in terms of computing capability, battery life, latency, and data usage. In this survey, we pay our attention to collaborative multi-device computation, and discuss the QoE guarantee, user incentives and other challenges that exit in this area. We also study the networking technologies that can be utilized in multi-device collaboration. In the end of the survey, we point out some future research directions in real-time collaborative mobile systems.